[Haskell-cafe] A 3-line program that does not work

[Reid Barton]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 01:27:39PM -0700, Philippos Apolinarius wrote:
> I have a friend who is an architect. I asked her why she does not use Haskell, since she is fond of functional programming. She writes her scripts in Clean, and needs to compile them before using them to generate postscript diagrams. In Haskell, I told her, she could use runghc, and skip the compilation step. She told me that she would consider switching to Haskell, and skipping the compilation step, if I could tell her how to write "façade" in Haskell.
> 
> C:\ghc\hastex>runghc tudin.hs
> 
> tudin.hs:10:19:
>     lexical error in string/character literal (UTF-8 decoding error)
> 
> After browsing the Internet, I noticed that a many of people are having the same problem.  Could someone tell me what is wrong with my friend's program?

Her editor probably saved the file in a text encoding other than
UTF-8, such as ISO-8859-1.  By definition a Haskell program is a
Unicode text document.  runhaskell is encountering an invalid UTF-8
sequence E7 61 while decoding your program file.

The other responses will be relevant too, once the program is
lexically correct.

Regards,
Reid Barton